Are Secondary schools different? There are undisputed issues and complexities involved in introducing a rights-based approach into secondary schools: size of school; numbers of students and staff on site; ensuring consistency – students work with many different adults each day; difficulties engaging with parents; importance of preparing students for adult life/promoting positive values/decision making; time constraints/exam pressure/innovation overload; introducing the concepts at a later stage in a student’s development, rather than it being something talked about from birth or at the start of their education.

However, equally undisputed is the fact that introducing a rights-based approach helps a school to become a better place to learn, a better place to work and a better place to send our children and young people.

While each educational sector is doing fantastic and innovative work to introduce rights into their learning environments, the real impact on our communities and on society will only be seen when we can ensure all children and young people are educated about, experience and understand their rights from birth and throughout their education.

These examples show how this is possible in a secondary setting; the schools highlighted below show how awareness of  rights can be introduced in with in a secondary setting and can pervade the whole ethos of the school.

Click to see film clips of rights based learning in practice and to share management tools, training materials and teaching resources.